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Brexit: Summer in Limbo

While our MPs are off on holiday until September, at CLASS we’ve been taking stock of where our representatives have left us on the biggest issue of the day (and probably the next few years), Brexit. Here are the three big issues we’ll be thinking about over the summer:

1. Negotiations don’t seem to be going well.

It’s difficult to believe that the Brexit vote was only 13 months ago. It looks like the timescale for negotiations is starting to hit home – although we will leave in March 2019, we will effectively need a deal by autumn 2018 so that it can go through the European Parliament. On top of this, EU negotiators have insisted that the so-called divorce bill and rights of EU citizens are settled before any negotiations on our future relationship.

3. The government has realised that cutting immigration isn’t necessarily a good thing.

The government has mishandled the migration debate for many years, setting consistently missed arbitrary targets on migration numbers and demonising immigrants and refugees. We saw a dramatic rise in hate crime post referendum, and the campaign was dominated by misinformation and hate speech about immigration.

Not only does hardened rhetoric on cutting immigration hurt our communities, it will damage our economy and the institutions we care about.

Overall, it’s still a mixed and murky picture on Brexit. There are signs that the government might finally (and belatedly) be looking at EU immigration in a more practical way. Confirmation on a transition deal should be welcomed, but we haven’t been enhancing our global reputation during Brexit negotiations so far. While negotiations continue in the background, we’ll be waiting until the autumn for a clearer picture of Brexit. Let’s hope this is just a shaky start, and that we’ll start to see a more constructive approach to the most important negotiation we’ve faced in our lifetimes.